Purposes and Background

What benefit it will have for improving efficiency and effectiveness of government operations?

What will have to change in policy and governance as we know it to transform government to better share information across organizational boundaries and better serve the citizen?

Note: The SOA CoP is a project of the Governance Subcommittee of the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee but is not endosed by the AIC nor is it seeking AIC endorsement. The AIC and SOA CoP are separate and different organizations. Preparations: Government Line of Business Demonstration Specification and Demonstration

Tutorials

Tutorial #1, Wednesday, MAY 24th, 8:30 AM - 12 Noon:

Title: Service Reference Architecture and Planning

Abstract: Planning for services requires a taxonomy and classification system to allow an organization to have consistency of approach and as a basis for policy development. This tutorial will discuss creating a reference architecture for various types of business service and how this forms the basis for a structured service planning and management process.

Intended for: Architects, Business Analysts, Asset Managers.

Level: Advanced

Prerequisites: Familiarity with SOA concepts

Duration: 1/2 day

Topics:

Concepts review

Reference Architecture Context

Classification systems

Policy types

Planning methodology

Deliverables

Governance

Linkage to upstream and downstream processes

Instructor: David Sprott is CEO and Principal Analyst for CBDI Forum - a world leading research organization developing best practice guidance for SOA. David leads and coordinates the CBDI research effort across all aspects of SOA. His personal research and consulting area includes services adoption roadmap and planning methodologies.

Tutorial #2, Wednesday, MAY 24th, 1 - 4:15 pm:

Title: MDA and Semantic Web Services:

Abstract: The Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) is an emerging standard from the Object Management Group that supports ontology development and conceptual modeling in several standard representation languages. It provides a coherent framework for visual ontology creation based on OMG’s Meta Object Facility (MOF™) and UML™ (Unified Modeling Language), bridging Model Driven Architecture (MDA®)-based standards for automating the physical management and integration of metadata with Semantic Web technologies. The ODM is nearing finalization in the OMG, and has garnered tremendous support from the W3C Semantic Web best practices working group and the international metadata standards community (ISO JTC1/SC32) in addition to many OMG members. The Ontology PSIG is now considering an agenda for follow-up work that may include:

Extensions to the current specification to provide non-normative, QVT-based mappings to and from the Common Logic metamodel.

Support for Semantic Web services.

Emerging work in rules interchange.

Guidelines for interoperability with the recently adopted Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR), Production Rules Representation (PRR), and the Information Modeling & Management (IMM) specifications.

In this tutorial, we will walk through features of the ODM, particularly the RDF and OWL metamodels, and provide insight into the UML Profile for RDF and OWL, highlight current initiatives in the W3C, ISO, and OASIS communities that influence ongoing work in the Ontology PSIG, present the status and highlights of some of the emerging proposals for representation of Semantic Web Services and look at a few example applications and architectures that implement these, including the DoD SSOA project as well as ongoing research in InferenceWeb.

Special Recognitions

The Conference Planning Committee Expresses Appreciation to All Who Contributed to the Success of This Conference: The Presentors, The Exhibitors, The Tutorials, and The Attendees, and Congratulates Those Who Received Special Recognitions. We Hope to See You in About 6 Months at the 2nd!

For “Outstanding Service” to the First SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.

Roy Mabry, Co-Chair AIC Governance Subcommittee:

For "Fostering" the SOA Community of Practice and the First SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.

Ron Schmelzer, ZapThink:

For "Outstanding Leadership" to SOA as Founder of ZapThink and Co-Author of “Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business” at the First SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.

Cory Casanave, CEO/President, Data Access Technologies, Inc.:

For "Outstanding Leadership" of the SOA Community of Practice SOA Demonstration and Specification for the First SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.

For “Best Presentation" in the Breakout Session at the First SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.

Call for Presentation and Exhibiting Proposals

UPDATE: The Call for Proposals has closed and all have been accepted (see below) and the Planning Committee and Four Track Leads are making the final selection of placement and order which will be posted at the Conference Wiki.

The Services-Oriented Architecture Community of Practice (SOA CoP) is soliciting participation in the SOA for E-Government Conference, May 23-24, 2006. We’d like to stress that we are not asking for proposals to accomplish work that has not already been done, rather, we are asking for products, services, results, etc. that are essentially in place.

Important Dates:

Proposals need to be submitted by MARCH 31st and accepted proposals will be notified by APRIL 7th.

The proposals should be submitted in a paper of no greater than two pages in Microsoft Word. Submissions should include the name of the organization, key technical points of contact, and the key users or audience, either Government or commercial organizations. Also, the proposal should include a description of what will be demonstrated or described along with needs for electrical power and Internet connectivity (including any special ports).

NOTE: Space limitiations does not permit us to have conventional booths or displays. Appropriate handouts are permitted and encouraged. See DRAFT for this conference (room setup, poster size, etc.)

For accepted proposals, papers limited to 10 pages in Word or PDF format and/or presentation slides in PowerPoint or PDF up to 30 slides in length, must be submitted by MAY 19th and will appear in the Conference Proceedings.

(2) the May 24th, Four Basic Areas in the Main Session: (a) SOA Reference Models, Specifications, and Standards; (b) SOA Governance; (c) SOA Implementation and Testing; and (d) Connections to the FEA Service Components Reference Model

(3) the Breakout Session

(4) the proceedings of the conference in the Wiki,

(5) special recognitions for excellence and innovation.

Content:

The paper should describe solutions you are building using SOA. One of the key objectives of this conference is to foster pilot projects and vendor implementations using the SOA Demo Strawman for which a Core Team has been formed lead by Cory Casanave to define the plan and refine the specification. See the SOA CoP Archive for details.

Logistics

Date & Location: May 23-24, 2006, at The MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, MITRE-1 Building Auditorium, 7515 Colshire Drive McLean, VA 22102-7508. See Map. Please follow signs to the East and West Parking Lots and enter by the Conference Center Entrance.

MITRE Shuttle Bus service available from the West Falls Church Metro Station starting at 6:40 a.m., continuing every 20 minutes, and last bus from MITRE at 5:40 p.m. Drop off at MITRE 1 and 2 (come to the back of MITRE 1 for entrance).

This event will be video taped and streamed to other MITRE facilities. Please face the video camera and state you name and affiliation when asking questions or making comments so the remote participants can see and hear you.

Line of Business Demonstration

This is the participant working page.

In concert with both the SOA community of practice and IAC, a group has started a “SOA Demo” that will provide a resource for use by government and industry as we communicate and validate SOA as a strategic approach. This was initiated at the last SOA Conference and we have made a commitment to a demo for the Oct 30th SOA-COP conference. While we are focused on that conference as a deadline, our goal is to be able to use such a demo for multiple venues.

The goals of this demonstration are:

To provide a concrete example of how the SOA approach provides business value to a community

To provide confidence that the approach and technologies are real – secure, reliable, performing and practical.

To validate that independently developed applications can interoperate using SOA standards

The demonstration will consist of one or more scenarios', each of which will allow multiple participants using multiple technologies to work together using services. In addition the demo will support an orientation web page and white papers on SOA.

The demo is intended to involve scenarios that will resonate with government stakeholders and also allows multiple industry participants to play a role. Industry participants will be given the opportunity to show how they can support a SOA architecture with their services and tools, interacting with each other across the scenario’s service interfaces. We also expect the demo to be a living resource, to be “up” continuously to show SOA collaboration across the internet.

The intent of the demo is to define web service messages that define the contract of interaction between parties - exactly what information is sent and when. XBRL defines a very general "ledger transaction" that encompasses much of the information in the request, there is no standard way to subset a ledger transaction to support specific message scheme - as you would expect in a web services message. Despite this issue, there is a shared desire to leverage XBRL.

We looked at the option of defining a subset message based on reverse engineering messages, defining a new schema, etc. What we landed on as a temporary measure is to wrap the generic XBRL schema in a message specific complex type wrapper and then use these as our message content. This is not seen as the "proper" architectural approach but is being done to expedite getting an initial demo running.

Grand & Howard agreed to work on some example instance documents to better define the interactions. Tom agreed to test the use of the XBRL schema for creating the web services specification.

Additional traffic is expected on the email list as the schema and example instances are further defined.

CBC – easier if we are able to import – attempted import of XBRL schema…

Howard - Problem: CBC drag and drop may not match XBRL taxonomy…creating an arbitrary instance document which may not match the requirements of the XBRL GL. Howard’s approach takes this taxonomy/entry header into account

CBC – not sure he understands the XBRL schema as presented

Lisa: Designed after a General Ledger requirement

Grant: elaborated on GL requirements

All: attempt to match CBC’s “Time Sheet” data to the XBRL GL schema

Grant: comes down to the question of what we really want to demo

CBC: How to present using XBRL?

Grant: We are looking at transaction level info that is generally reported out at a summarized level

Lisa: Need to look further as to how to present?

CBC: Looking at whole picture…analyzing how stuff flows through to the project reporting.

Grant: Need to determine what level of reporting is required at the Project level.

CBC – would like simpler representation than having to include the entire XBRL schema. For example, create a simple, independent time sheet and then feed that to the payroll system which would output XBRL.

Ed: What about things like Service Discovery (UDDI)? CBC –well that is what we hoping to have the other folks who are not here discuss…At this point in time, we might not have the resources to implement?

Grant will talk to Howard tomorrow about scheduling, etc.

Grant/CBC: keep number of elements as simple as possible…

2006 October 3

The 3rd SOA-Demo face-face meeting: Meeting presentation has been updated with the revised model.

Agenda:

The focus of this meeting was to further define the demo scenario identified in the last meeting.

Brand suggested an alternate demo: based on Federal Financial Transparency Act (each agency will need to create an interoperable database of financial information…Bring SOA to the agencies to address the new Act…problem that needs to be solved by the beginning of next year… Here is a location for a description of the act.

In the first meeting it was resolved that the scenario of the demo would involve the interaction of the HR and Finance lines of business with an integration with HSPD-12. Based on this general framework we discussed the subject services and processes.

Consensus was reached on the scenario as follows:

The scenario will involve three primary roles; HR-LOB, Finance-LOB and a “Project” or “Program” (Program may be a better term). The intent is to track the human resources costs associated with the project.

This will involve “time sheets” in HR charged against multiple project line items and costed by finance. As a result the project will have better control of its expenses. Project expenses will then be visible though a “Dashboard” and also available to a “Monitoring” role that will have access to project roll-up information, probably presented using XBRL.

The "extra sauce" provided by SOA is that HR and Finance are both lines of business in different organizations, each of which is used by the project/program in the "client agency" – organizations are NOT expected to be running the same technology stack. The SOA contracts between the lines of business allows for real time and high fidelity tracking of project costs across these organizational boundaries. In addition, other providers of either lines of business could be substituted - providing flexibility for multiple government hosted and commercially hosted line of business providers. As the demo progresses it is expected that there will be at least 2 demo organizations playing each role.

Technically it is expected that the client agency and the lines of business will implement their services using diverse technology stacks and business processes, showing that the SOA solution is organizationally, process and technically agnostic and thus allows for these diverse solutions to be integrated such that the organizations collaborate to achieve a business purpose.

This demo should provide a proof of concept for the Federal Transition Framework and Agile Enterprise transformation as well as SOA.

Services would then include (but not be limited to):

Timesheet (Employee->HR),

Establish Project

Project Time Costs Assignment(HR->Project),

Cost of Services(Project->Finance),

Employee sub-ledger(HR->Finance),

Project roll Up (Monitor->Project),

Project Update (Project -> Dashboard).

Notional Process:

Employee resource is established (HR)

Project is established

HR updates HR with employee costs in sub-ledger

Employee submits time sheet for project(s)

HR submits time to project (with approval)

Project gets cost info from finance

Project updates dashboard

Monitor asks for summary information about project

It was also decided that the services for bringing on a new employee would be interesting in this context but that we would not focus on that in the first revision - this lessens the visibility of HSPD-12.

Oracle agreed to focus on the HR role.

Follow Up:

All – Collect domain information and expertise.

Email – further define scenario and services.

Next meeting:10/3/06 – 9:30 am at DAT.

Note: We may want a "business model" and "technical approach" track in the next meeting.

2006 September 11

The first SOA-Demo face-face meeting:

In attendance were:

U.S. GSA – George Thomas

Sun – Debbie Brown

Oracle – Eric Reed

Raytheon – Robert Cromp, Kathy DiMaggio

BAH – Joe Chiusano

Kapow – Kash Badami, Sean Robertson

SOA.Com – Paul Diorio

Wellfleet Software – Farrukh Najmi

Comcare - Sukumar Dwarkanath

William Sweet

Data Access Technologies – Tom Digre, Cory Casanave

(I apologize - I know I am leaving someone off, please let me know)

The conclusions reached at the meeting were:

Our initial target is the October SOA-COM conference at which we intend to have a multi-party executing demo

The demo is expected to be a lasting resource that can be used and extended after that venue

The structure of the demo is multi-organization with different organizations running different technology stacks, interoperating. There will be no “central technology stack” other than web services and a registry

Participants will provide and/or use and/or monitor services within the demo scenario to highlight their strengths. Participants may also show design or other related capabilities.

The demo scenario will focus on the interoperation of government lines of business. The lines of business selected are HR and Finance. HSDPD-12 will also be a part of the scenario.

The scenario will focus on the contracts of interaction between HR and Finance, automated with SOA web services.

It will be structured such that there can be multiple HR and Finance organizations (running diverse technologies) that can all plug-and-play due to the SOA specification. Later extensions of the scenario can focus of increased security, privacy, QoS, Fail-over (In a disaster recovery sub-scenario), etc.

The next meeting, still to be scheduled, will focus on the HR/Finance line of business scenario to start the specification. Participants will collect relevant design information and expertise. I am proposing Thursday the 21st for that meeting.

Regards, Cory Casanave

PS: All further communications will be done via the soa-demo list.

Line of Business Demonstration Specification

The SOA Community of Practice is sponsoring a demonstration of the business value and technical feasibility of SOA. This demonstration will encompass the full life-cycle of a multi-party SOA solution using multiple participants and multiple technologies collaborating via SOA standards in an architected community. Please see our Architecture and Specification.

The goals of this demonstration are:

To provide a concrete example of how the SOA approach provides business value to a community.

To provide confidence that the approach and technologies are real – secure, reliable, performing and practical.

To validate that independently developed applications can interoperate using SOA standards.

The demonstration will consist of one or more scenarios', each of which will allow multiple participants using multiple technologies to work together using services. In addition the demo supports an orientation web page and white papers on SOA.

This work is sponsored as a U.S. Government effort, A Project of the Governance Subcommittee of the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee with joint participation by the IAC SOA committee. Commercial participants participate as a volunteer effort. As a government sponsored effort the SOA demo is an open and collaborative.

A group of interested government and industry participants have formed to produce the demo. The scenario has been defined with a business and technical architecture for the SOA. The scenario involves the interactions of two government "Lines of Business" (LoB) in support of a programs employee and contractor costs. The program, lines of business & contractors are all assumed to be independent organizations using different technology stacks. Acors in this community interact according to the services architecture that is composed of the following:

Description of the business problem.

Definition of the roles various organizations and individuals will play and the services they provide and consume in the LoB community.

The standards and technologies used (E.G. Modal Driven Architecture, XBRL and Web Services).

Specification of the technology services (Using Web Services) that support the community and thus implement the SOA.

This demo is part of an open, government sponsored community – participation by multiple individuals, agencies, organizations and companies is welcome. See SoaLobDemo

Contact: cory-c (at) enterprisecomponent.com

Government Line of Business Scenario:

The scenario involves three primary roles; HR/Payroll-LOB, Finance-LOB and a “Program” with multiple projects. The intent is to track the human resources and contractor costs associated with the projects in real time. See SoaLobDemoDocs for more information.

This will involve “time sheets” in HR charged against multiple project line items and costed by finance. As a result the project will have better control of its expenses. Contractors will send invoices to finance which will also be applied to project costs. Project expenses will then be visible though a “Dashboard” and also available to a “Monitoring” role that will have access to project roll-up information, presented using XBRL.

The "extra sauce" provided by SOA is that HR and Finance are both lines of business in different organizations, each of which is used by the /program in the "client agency" – organizations are NOT expected to be running the same technology stack. The SOA contracts between the lines of business allows for real time and high fidelity tracking of project costs across these organizational boundaries. In addition, other providers of either lines of business could be substituted - providing flexibility for multiple government hosted and commercially hosted line of business providers. As the demo progresses it is expected that there will be at least 2 demo organizations playing each role.

Technically it is expected that the client agency and the lines of business will implement their services using diverse technology stacks and business processes, showing that the SOA solution is organizationally, process and technically agnostic and thus allows for these diverse solutions to be integrated such that the organizations collaborate to achieve a business purpose.

This demo provides a proof of concept for the Federal Transition Framework and Agile Enterprise transformation as well as SOA.

Notional Process:

Project is established and registered with finance

Finance sends charge codes to HR, the employee and contractor

Employee submits time sheet for project(s)

HR submits time to finance

Contractor submits invoice to finance

Project gets cost info from finance

Project updates dashboard

Business intelligence asks for summary information about project

High level Model of SOA community:

The above diagram shows the roles various people, systems and organizations will play in the scenario.

Readiness Assessment

Panel Discussion: Embracing the right people, questions, and policies for success with SOA in the Federal enterprise

Preface: Most (not all) government agencies that have had success in implementing shared-services at both the Federal and State level share a common theme – They either had a mandate to share information to support cross-agency mission, or they had a fiscal crisis that forced them to change their paradigm about IT funding, procurement, and acquisition. This panel-discussion will address what it takes to implement SOA in government-agencies proactively.

Session Breakdown:

Welcome and Introduction to the Panelists by the Moderator

Opening remarks (5 minutes) by each of the Panelists on the session topic

Technology is changing at a global pace, and the flattened the world has brought with it new value propositions, supply chains and geopolitical realities. Recent global natural disasters demonstrate that governments all over the world are not prepared for these events – highlighting the importance of the government’s ability to communicate internally, across organizational boundaries, and with the public.

The rapid adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards by business, software product vendors, and the government has established SOA as the leading enterprise software architecture paradigm today. SOA helps organizations respond more rapidly and cost-effectively to the changing conditions they face by promoting reuse of existing IT assets across the enterprise. SOA also allows government agencies to provide “plug-and-play” extensions to their legacy data systems, thus making these islands of data accessible via the Web.

This panel will discuss what it takes to implement SOA in government-agencies proactively to enable information sharing to support cross-agency mission, without being mandated to do so. The panelist will address the challenges of undertaking such initiatives; what agencies need to know to prepare for these initiatives; and the available information from various SOA Communities of interest/practice that they can leverage to be successful.